No, that's not it. The Google educated. Sigh. It is 'A defense of abortion' by Thomson. An article which you wouldn't consider to have any philosophical merits, given her appeal to a series of thought experiments about cases that appear relevantly analogous to abortion cases. You'd no doubt tell her about the law on abortion and then direct her to some overlong book you've read.

Anyway, you seem to have precisely nothing to say of any philosophical interest. Stop Barty baiting and engage with the arguments.

Oo, excellent point. Yes, that's how philosophy works. No arguments - we just wait for James's pronouncements.

Still no philosophical points. Just more baiting.

Do you know what the most reproduced article in philosophy is?

Really- you think the OP has no philosophical content. Okay. Well, you know better than stupid old me and my silly thought experiments - you're right, they've got no role to play in ethical theorizing. Once more, you show a foolish professional philosopher the error of his ways - thanks Tim!!!

Oh gosh, I never realized that. Golly. So, philosophical reflection on the nature of ethics has informed the law. Wow. I see. Cor, thanks for that insight. That's really important.

And I engaged in some of that philosophical reflection, did I not, in the OP - and then you ignored it.

More great points. You're on fire today! Do you have anything at all philosophical to say about the arguments made in the OP? Or are you just Bartricks baiting?

No. Try thinking about my examples. It's called thought experimenting. Or just 'thinking' for short. It's how you gain ethical insight into controversial issues.

Or you could just decide that I am wrong about everything and work from there - see how that goes.

Do you have anything philosophical to contribute?

Yes, excellent point - what the law says is automatically right. We do not need to discuss the ethics of any particular laws. Good point. You're good. Lawyers are the real moral philosophers. Why don't moral philosophers realize this? Really good point.

And yes, that's right Timbo, I am a child and I don't know what I am talking about and the method of using thought experiments about relevantly analogous cases is really stupid and I'm dumb and stupid and an idiot and not a professional philosopher at all. Good points. All good points and well worth making.

Er, okay. Good argument. Such insight.

That is how it works. If you want to find out the right and wrongs of these matters, my method is the one to be adopted - that is, one thinks about relevantly analogous cases about which parties are not heavily politically or financially invested.

THis is not about what the law says. This is about what the right and wrongs of the matter are.

If you honestly acquire a stolen car and then crash it, that's the same as honestly acquiring the slice of pizza and eating most of it. The original owner is entitled to the crust that remains, but not entitled to have you pay for what you ate.

Isn't that what your intuitions say about the pizza slice case? Intuitively Rodney does not owe you the cost of that pizza slice - or at least, the debt is not of a kind that force can be used to extract.

The same applies to the car.

Another scenario: imagine that you honestly acquire a stolen vehicle. Well, the original owner is entitled to it back.

Does it make any difference if it transpires that the car was stolen from outside a bar and had the original owner driven it, he was so steaming drunk he'd have crashed it and written it off? That is, do you now 'not' owe the original owner the car as had it not been stolen the car would be in a worse state than it is for having been stolen? No, you owe the original owner the car.

I would maintain that, IF, the pizza were still available in it's original state, AND Rodney were to suffer no additional loss, other than said pizza, it should be returned to the original owner. — Book273

My intuitions agree with that - if the original item that was honestly acquired is in its original state, then it goes back to its original owner and the loss has to be born by the honest acquirer.

But if the original item is destroyed by the honest acquirer (as in the pizza eating case) or reduced in value as in the one bite case), then the loss has to be borne by the original victim.

Seems arbitrary, but in both cases we have someone who has done nothing wrong having to bear the cost due to the lack of the original wrongdoer.

And yes, I agree with this:

However, if Rodney were to suffer a loss from the returning of the pizza, then the original owner should be obligated to either a) Accept payment for original cost of pizza, B) accept the loss and move on, or C) Compensate Rodney for all of the lost value of the pizza beyond its original cost. — Book273

You say:

Therefore, in application to lands "taken" (a preposterous concept, everything has been "taken" from someone is you go back far enough. Should I sue England for damages from the Acadian expulsion? Perhaps England can raise a case against Italy for the Roman Occupation. Just Idiotic. But I digress) — Book273

Yes, I think time makes a difference - that is, the mere passage of time can make a difference to how we should behave in light of an injustice.

Lands taken would be worth X. Improvements on said land would be worth Y. Therefore X-Y would be the balance owing to the original "owners" (bah ha ha) of the land. If the improvements are worth less than the original land, the land and some positive balance would be returned. However, if improvements are worth more than the land (likely) then the balance would be negative, therefore the land would be returned, along with an invoice for improvements made to same. — Book273

I suppose that could be another way of doing it. Applying the intuitions from the pizza case, any devaluation of the land is not something the honest acquirer owes to the original party - that is, any loss is the victim's to bear. Whereas any improvement belongs to the honest acquirer. As in the 'turns the pizza slice into a work of art' case - Rodney owes the original owner $2, not $2,000 (or alternatively, the original owner gets the slice but now must compensate ROdney to the tune of $1888).

I have seen land be uncontested by local first nations, with the affected nation claiming no interest in the designated lands (they did not want them) initially. However, once substantial improvements had been made to the land (City put in a high end subdivision), suddenly the local first nation demanded the return of their ancestral lands, lands that in previous consultation had been described as "having no value to the first nation and are of therefore no interest to same." Due process had been followed and the city retained ownership of said subdivision. Courts (yes, it went to court) found in favor of the city, and the local first nation decried the travesty of justice. — Book273

Yes, it sounds as if the courts were quite right. I mean, those who might be tempted to argue it was a travesty of justice would, if they were consistent, agree that it was also a travesty of justice that the original owners did nothing with their land for so long, and thus deprived the rest of us of the benefits that might flow from its development!

Well, I was well and truly bored by the time I got to the point where you told me how bored you were. But anyway, you didn't address anything I argued, you just stated something counterintuitive, namely that Rodney owes you the value of the pizza he consumed plus interest. Again, you'll need to do better than that if you want followers.

And you seem incapable of following an argument or controlling your temper

So not only is god omnibenevolent, he doesn't allow injustices. — ToothyMaw

That's not additional - it's part of what being omnibenevolent involves.

So you actually think these people deserved what they got. Good on you, Batricks, you fucking psycho. — ToothyMaw

No, as I explained above. Learn to follow an argument. And it is you, incidentally, who thinks innocence doesn't matter, which makes you the psycho, or at least morally flat footed to say the least!

The rest was just bog standard virtue signaling. Seems you're quick to temper - is that a virtue?

I still think that your view is the counterintuitive one. What about the preacher who develops Huntington's and the child-murderer that walks free and healthy? — ToothyMaw

You're not following this. This is just silly now.

God doesn't allow injustices. So, if God exists, there are no injustices. Wrongs, yes. But no injustices.

Do you follow that?

I then explained how one can deserve to be exposed to a 'risk' of harm.

Did you follow that bit?

If I buy a lottery ticket, I don't deserve to win, do I?

But if I win, is that unjust?

No.

Clearly i need to join the dots here, though I thought the example was obvious.

If you do wrong, you deserve to be exposed to a risk of harm.

That's analogous to buying the lottery ticket - you don't deserve to win, you deserve the chance of winning.

If you get lucky and win, you did not 'deserve' to win, though there is no injustice in you receiving all the money.

Again then, if you get unlucky and get some ghastly disease or are treated atrociously by some other wrongdoer here, then you did not 'deserve' that, though no injustice occurred through you getting it.

So, again, we deserve - I suspect - to be exposed to the risk of harm our ignorance exposes us to.

That includes the risk of getting horrible diseases and so on.

Some of us will get horrible diseases, others won't.

Some people who buy lottery tickets lose, some win.

There's no injustice, though, as we all deserved to face the risk. Or did if God exists. Or, alternatively (but I think less reasonably) we all deserve every particular thing that happens to us.

The important point is that if God exists, that's the only reasonable conclusion to draw. And thus evidence that God exists 'is' evidence that we deserve either to face the risks we face, or the specific things that happen to us.

Who is telling us and how? — ToothyMaw

God, via our faculty of reason.

But note, all philosophers will appeal to the representations of our faculties of reason as the source of insight into what is right and good and just. Most will deny that the faculty is the means by which God is communicating with us. But that's beside the point - for my case to go through, it is sufficient that we have excellent reason to think that a good, omnipotent person does not suffer innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world.

So, my case does not presuppose the truth of a divine command metaethics and an associated epistemological theory. It just assumes that being good involves not wanting innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world and that when accompanied by the power to prevent that from happening, a good person exercises that power and prevents it.

You quite literally said that we can infer god's characteristics from our own. How is that not believing that we are created in god's image? — ToothyMaw

Because, er, that's not what I said. I "quite literally" didn't. Sheesh. I said we can infer something about God's character from the content of our moral intuitions.

If I am told to be kind, generous, and so on, I can infer - fairly safely, though not infallibly - that the person issuing such instructions really likes kindness and generosity. And from that I can infer - again, not entirely reliably - that this person is therefore probably kind and generous themselves.

That is not remotely the same as saying "we are created in God's image", is it? That you could confuse the two shows that you are making assumptions about me - you're assuming you're talking to a regular religio. You ain't.

I would think that it is worse for a harm to befall a child because they are developing and trauma could cause them to become maladjusted. Or so I think, at least - I'm no psychologist. — ToothyMaw

So you don't think their innocence is the issue? What is especially terrible about harms befalling the innocent is that they are innocent. Now, perhaps you do not have that intuition - okay, some people are colour blind and some people have blindspots in their faculties of reason. But it is widely shared - about as widely shared as the visual impression that the sky is blue.

You are assuming that god created us in his image, a decidedly Theistic thing to believe. — ToothyMaw

I don't know what you're talking about. You're assuming I'm an off the peg religious person, yes? Don't. I'm not. Just address my arguments and resist the temptation to attribute to me views I do not hold. (I do not believe God created us - I think it's wrong to create people and so I don't think God did so; and he tells us as much in a variety of ways; we have free will, but wouldn't if He'd created us, and so on....but let's not get distracted by these issues).

I don't believe justice is necessarily a permutation of omnibenevolence unless god makes justice an objective, moral necessity. — ToothyMaw

Like I say, you're just ignoring all those representations of reason that tell us about moral desert. Ironically, if you genuinely do not believe in there being a difference between deserving a harm and not, then there's nothing especially bad about harms befalling innocent people is there!!

If a child comes to some great harm, doesn't the badness of that reside in the fact the child is innocent?

According to what criterion can we determine if God is unjust? — ToothyMaw

We use our reason. Our faculty of reason is our source of insight into what is right and good. And from such intuitions we can infer something about God's character. So, God hates it when people are unkind. I infer that from the fact that we all seem bid - and bid in no uncertain terms - be kind. God is clearly pro kindness, then. And God seems to hate unkindness so much that he wants those who are unkind to come to harm. I infer that from the fact my reason tells me that if someone is unkind, they deserve to come to harm.

Is god aware of what is going to happen to people or not? If so he is unjust if the harm incurred by different people is disproportionate to their guilt. If not he is not omniscient*. — ToothyMaw

Again, why do you keep just insisting that people are being punished disproportionate to their guilt?
If that's not something a good person would allow, then God doesn't allow it and no one is being punished disproportionately! You just keep blithely ignoring the very argument I am giving.

God does not disproportionately punish! Thus, if God exists, no one is being disproportionately punished. Logic!

That does not mean that everyone deserves every bad thing that happens to them - though that would be consistent with the thesis - for it could be that what we deserve is to face the 'risk' of harm.

The point remains, however, that God is not going to punish unjustly: he's good and omnipotent.
Thus, if He exists, nothing unjust is happening here.
Wrongdoing yes. But no injustice.

As to whether God is aware - no, I suspect not. As I have already said, I don't see why a good omnipotent person would bother trying to find out what is happening to us here.

If you think that's incompatible with being omniscient, then you're wrong, as omnisicence involves being in possession of all knowledge, not all truths. It is up to God what he is or is not ignorant of.

Never said I think people deserve to come to harm; even despicable people need to be loved and rehabilitated. If harm befalls them during this process then so be it, but other than that I don't think anyone deserves harm. — ToothyMaw

Well, that's a controversial and counter-intuitive moral view. My view is respects our moral intuitions about what goodness actually involves; you're just ignoring some of them.

I'm saying if god allows people to come to disproportionate harm then he is unjust - not unjust for not preventing all harm. — ToothyMaw

And where do I say otherwise? You don't seem to understand my position. If God exists, he does not allow injustices to occur. He's good and omnipotent, for goodness sake! So, we can conclude that we either deserve every single bad - or apparently bad - thing that happens to us, or we can conclude - and this, I think, is the more reasonable conclusion for reasons already given - that we deserved to be exposed to the risk of harm.

Note, if I buy a lottery ticket and win the lottery, I did not 'deserve' to win the lottery. I deserved the chance of winning it. Nevertheless, my winning it is not an injustice.

This thread is about the problem of evil, not the credibility of a divine command metaethics. Focus.

And if you want confirmation that we are living in a prison, just look around you at others, or look inside yourself. Notice that pretty much everyone you meet has some vice or other. And notice that you do too.
— Bartricks

True enough. — ToothyMaw

So you accept that this is a world full of wrongdoers - full of people who deserve to come to harm of one sort or another. And it is a world in which they do!

If one is in any doubt about the justice of the world, just consider parents. They have a god-like power to subject what they take to be an innocent person to a lifetime here. They know what the world is like - they know that it is a place full of risks of harm of every conceivable kind. And yet they decide to go ahead and subject an 'innocent' (so, not actually an innocent, but someone they take to be one) to a life here. Well, surely that person now deserves to be exposed to the risks that living here involves? If you subject someone else to a lifetime of risk, you deserve to be exposed to a lifetime of risk yourself.

So, the fact that most people voluntarily procreate shows that most people are of a sort that deserve to be exposed to the risks that living here poses. Of course, they already deserved to be living here, else they wouldn't be here (God does not punish the innocent). So they've just earnt themselves another life stretch. The point, though, is that most people demonstrate well enough by their behaviour why they deserve to be here.

How on earth can one have reason to believe that they have received revelation other than some sort of subjective experience? Furthermore, how would reason have greater authority than the revelation received? It is quite literally the word of god, so it cannot be challenged. Maybe reason can aid in its application, however? — ToothyMaw

This takes us away from the topic. My point was that there's no higher authority than reason - so, if, for example, you think there is no reason to take what you thought was a revelation to be a revelation, then you'd just consider it a dream; whereas if you thought it really was a revelation, it'd be because you thought there was reason to think it was. Pointing out that there is no higher authority than God misses the point, for all it does is show that God and Reason are the same person.

What our punishments must be for our guilt is already known by god, so he knows exactly what each of us is going to be exposed to and could arrange the world in such a way as to make the punishments make sense if he wanted. Yet he doesn't do this. — ToothyMaw

Yes, he could - that's one option, one possibility. But it seems more efficient and consistent with being good to expose people to a risk of harm, rather than actually to mete the harm out oneself. I also think God would be ignorant of much of what goes on here, for why would God trouble himself to find out what people he hates are getting up to?

Thus, god punishes unjustly, and therefore is unjust. I don't know how that ties into omnibenevolence, but an unjust god seems undesirable. — ToothyMaw

That's just question begging. As I keep pointing out, being good doesn't involve indiscriminately preventing harms - it matters who is coming to harm. Good people among us do not campaign to release prisoners from jails, do we? We're not less good for that. They deserve to be there and releasing them would pose a great danger to others.

And again, our moral intuitions about moral desert, which undoubtedly exist, tell us that God wants those who do wrong to come to harm.

Divine command theory is a way of avoiding the problem of evil, not solving it. The point that I used above is the same counter to divine command theory. If God commands that we torture our babies and eat them, that is a law. No one would think that this was good, much less "the perfect good." — Philosophim

Again, you're not staying on point. This is about the problem of evil, not the credibility of divine command theory. I am assuming that morality has the content it appears to have. The tired old objection to divine command theory is that it seems to allow that morality's content could change. But given that I am assuming it has whatever content it actually appears to have, this is all beside the point, as I keep saying.

But at this point I think we've both made our cases. I've pointed out you're not really talking about a God that is omnibenevolent, and given several reasons pointing that out. You believe for your part, that might makes right, and that omnibenevolent is simply an all powerful being making rules for others to follow. — Philosophim

Yes, you're just confused. I am talking about an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being. Nothing I have said implies otherwise.

And that's the entire problem your argument runs into. Morality is a set of constraints on what we should or should not do, independent of our power. An omnipotent being could change it, or defy it, but then it wouldn't be perfectly good. That is the part you are missing. — Philosophim

Er, no, it is not a problem. It is called 'divine command theory' - it's a metaethical theory about the fundamental nature of morality. According to this view - the view that is compatible with God's omnipotence - moral directives are directives of God. So there is no external constraint - God makes na act wrong by issuing a directive not to do it. That directive 'is' its wrongness. And moral values are God's values - that is, if God values something, then it is thereby made morally valuable, for the property of being morally good and the property of being valued by God are one and the same. (this is not 'might makes right' incidentally; it's 'Reason' makes right - and Reason is God....has to be, else God won't be omnipotent).

Thus, there is no external constraint on God. So you, I'm afraid, either do not understand the nature of omnipotence, or the nature of morality, or both.

But anyway, it is neither here nor there, for I am not solving the problem of evil by appealing to the fact God can make anything good if he wants, I am solving the problem consistent with morality having the content that it actually appears to have. God has the power to change that content - but there's what God can do, and what God has done. And morality has the content it has and according to that content an omnibenevolent being would not suffer innocent people to live in ignorance in a world like this one.

Yes, you are denying the property of omnibenevolent. — Philosophim

No. I. Am. Not.

Perhaps the part you do not understand is that what is good is independent from something with power. — Philosophim

I have no idea what that means. Here you are once more straying from the problem of evil and into the relationship between God and morality. I have already said that omnipotence requires that God have power over morality - that God's will and attitudes constitutively determine what is right and good. To think otherwise is, as I have already pointed out to you, to conceive of God as 'bound' by morality - as if morality is some curious force or straightjacket that even God is subject to!

God makes morality. Now that, in itself, does nothing whatever to overcome the problem of evil. For our source of insight into the content of morality - into what is in fact right and in fact good - is our reason. And our reason tells us that qualities such as sadism and so forth are vices. Thus, despite the fact that God can make anything good if he so wants, the fact remains that sadism is actually a vice and thus we can reasonably infer that God does not have it. He 'could' have it and still be omnibenevolent - for He could approve of sadism in himself despite disapproving of it in others. But that does not seem to be a reasonable default assumption to make. And so we are justified, well justified, in thinking that God himself instantiates the very character traits that he approves of us cultivating - so, we are justified in thinking that God is kind, generous, benevolent and so on.

And that is all it takes for the problem of evil to arise - or for an 'apparent' problem to arise, anyway (to insist it is a problem is to beg teh question after all).

And it is to that problem that I am addressing myself. For like most proponents of the problem, I accept entirely that a morally good person does not expose innocent people to the risks of harm that we are exposed to living here. It is just that I reason better than they do and conclude, as one should, that therefore He has not! Which is just what follows from the obviousness of that truth combined with the premise that God exists.
And from that it follows that we are not innocent. It's just logic.

Now once more, if you think that a good all powerful being would not expose guilty people to the risks of harm we face here, explain why.
You say that such a being could just change the evil into the good if he so wished. Yes. But that would be unjust, as I explained. It is not for me to change you into the person I want you to be, is it? If I did that - if I had an idea about how I'd like you to be, and had as well the power to make you answer to it and exercised it - I'd be doing wrong, yes? So why do you think it would be okay for God to do so? Or, to put it another way, given God clearly doesn't approve of us behaving in that manner, why do you think God approves of himself behaving in that manner?

God wants us to be certain sorts of people. But he's omnibenevolent so he's not going to just make us be those sorts of people, is he? What notion of omnibenevolence is that?

No. As stated earlier, if you know about Christianity, in it God sacrifices themselves to forgive the sins of humanity. He declares them all guilty, but forgives them. Are you saying this is evil? — Philosophim

I have not mentioned Christianity. I am not a Christian. I don't know much about it or care. I am a philosopher, not a theologian.

I have made an argument. To be clear: if there is evidence of God's existence, then that evidence is evidence of our guilt.

Absent evidence for God, we have no evidence of our innocence or our guilt. What we have instead is a justified presumption of innocence. But a presumption is not evidence. And thus should there be any evidence for God, that evidence overcomes the presumption.

But at this point, I think we've strayed from solving the problem of evil. — Philosophim

Then I do not think you understand what the 'problem' is. The 'problem' is that the bad things that happen to us seem to be of a sort that no good all powerful god would allow - and thus imply his non-existence. And that's quite right - of course, no good all powerful being would allow 'innocent' people to be exposed to the risks of such harms.

So the problem depends upon an assumption of innocence, as I keep saying. Yet we have no evidence of innocence or guilt, only an assumption - an assumption that, admittedly, it is reasonable to make. However, the reasonableness of the assumption is not grounded in evidence, but is rather morally justified. When it comes to evidence, should there be any that God exists, then it will be eo ipso evidence that we are not innocent at all, but deserve to be exposed to the risks living here exposes us to.

Now, if you think a good all powerful person would not expose guilty people to such risks, I want to see your argument for that. For I have now argued extensively for the opposite - that good people do not feel the same way about all harms, regardless of whether they're befalling the innocent or guilty. And that good people do not actively try and prevent justice from being done. I mean, does a good person release prisoners?

The title of your topic is "Solving the problem of evil". The problem of evil is a very specific problem defined by the contradiction inherent in the three omni's in one being. If you remove omnibenevolence as a restraint, then all you have is an omniscient, omnipotent God. Boom, problem avoided. — Philosophim

I have not done that. God is omnibenevolent and there is no problem of evil. Clear? I am not denying that God has any of those properties.

A good, all powerful being would not suffer innocent people to live in ignorance in a dangerous world.

Why do you think I think that? It is because a 'good' person doesn't want innocent people to suffer. And if that good person has the power to prevent it, then they do - or at least, so it is reasonable to suppose. It's all there in the OP, so quite why you think I am denying that God is omnibenevolent is beyond me.

You seem just to be ignoring the case I have made. What I have said about the relationship between morality and God was not to address the problem of evil, but to correct the idea that morality operates as some kind of external constraint.

When it comes to the problem of evil, I have shown that it involves a presumption of innocence. Presumptions, even when justified, are not evidence. And thus if evidence of God exists, that evidence is evidence of our guilt. And evidence trumps presumptions.

Now, our guilt solves the problem as there is no risk of harm that a person cannot in principle come to be deserving of. Your response is to just insist that being morally good involves indiscriminately preventing harms, regardless of what the person has done. Yet a cursory inspection of the nature of morality - which is our source of insight into God's nature - tells us that it is good when people get what they deserve, not bad. It is good to hate evil; good to want harm to befall an evil person. And when or if it does, we have justice, not injustice.

We ourselves build prisons and do not thereby show ourselves to be unjust. We build them to try and make the world more just. And we see them as morally justified by the three purposes they serve- to protect the innocent; to give the wrongdoer their just deserts; and to reform the wrongdoer. And that, then, is the purpose this world itself serves and it no more implies a lack of omnibenevolence on the part of its creator than our prisons do on the part of theirs.

An omnipotent being could, of course, just reform a wrongdoer at will. But that's the wrongdoer's job, not God's. So he clearly prefers to let wrongdoers fix themselves - ir not, as they choose - than to intervene and fix them himself. For that would be to impose himself on them. Whereas clearly God values free will and letting people make their own choices about the kinds of people they want to be.

I don't see how the example of your mother constitutes a counterexample. The hatred does not seem unjustified and time has passed. There are some injuries that only time and a great deal of suffering can heal. And here we are, doing that time and facing the risk of suffering. And hatred of others, when it is based on what they have freely done, is not morally bad, even if it is unpleasant. We can relieve ourselves by forgiving, but there is no requirement.
There is hatred that is just. Lots of it. And it is far from always bad. Consider: if your mother hates herself for what she did, that would be good, not bad, would it not?

But an omnibenevolent being would never choose to do wrong, even if they could. — Philosophim

I never said otherwise. My point is that an omnipotent being determines what's right and good. My point wasn't that they will sometimes do what is wrong and bad.

Are we omnibenevolent? No. We are imperfect beings that do a lot of immorality for our personal self satisfaction. Revenge for example. — Philosophim

I don't understand your point. At no point have I assumed we're omnibenevolent. Indeed, I have and am arguing that we're quite bad people!

Tell me, was it a silver lining that Dr Mengele lived out the rest of his life happily in Argentina?

No. I don't want them being happy off of doing the wrong thing. I don't want them profiting off of doing the wrong thing. — Philosophim

So you understand why an omnibenevolent being doesn't want that either?

Look, prisons don't serve one purpose. They serve three. First, to protect others from the wrongdoers - prevention. That's primarily why we are here. Not for our sakes, but for the sake of others.
Second, retribution. It is good when bad people get their just deserts.
Third, reform. That's why we have a moral sense.

1. If God exists, then he would not suffer innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
2. God exists
3. Therefore, God has not suffered innocents to live in ignorance in a dangerous world
— Bartricks

Valid but unsound I reckon. At least #1 is false, to my mind. Omnibenevolence only entails that from God's POV everything is good. That's perfectly consistent with human suffering. I'm a meta-ethical relativist. So you always have to specify a POV from which something is good or evil to avoid gibbering. — bert1

Well, that's a bit confused. Premise 1 is not necessarily true - I don't think any proposition is necessarily true, precisely because God exists and so can make any proposition false if He so wishes - but it is true beyond a reasonable doubt.

Your doubt, for instance, is not at all reasonable. God is all powerful - so he can do anything. God is also all good. Our reason - which is our source of insight into reality - tells us that being all good means not being a sadist. It means not exposing innocents to suffering if one does not have to. And God, being all powerful, did not have to expose innocents to any suffering. Hence the prima facie plausiblity of 1. Denying 1 involves, in one way or another, showing either ignorance of what goodness plausibly involves, or ignorance of what omnipotence involves.

An omnibenevolent being would do that which is perfectly good. — Philosophim

You're putting the cart before the horse. An omnipotent being determines what is right and good, for otherwise they would not be omnipotent. So it is not that there is 'what's good' and an omnipotent being then has to obey. That is to make morality into a god, a god who bosses God about! No, an omnipotent being makes a good thing good and a right thing right.

That is by the by, really. Because our source of insight into what is good and right is our reason and it is from that information that we can glean something about God's character. My point is just that if you think you understand omnipotence, then you do not if you think morality binds an omnipotent being: morality, no less than anything else, is under God's control.

Now if that being is already omnipotent, it can even do things that are contradictions, why would it need to jail anyone? — Philosophim

He does not 'need' to. He 'wants' to. A good person wants to keep evil people from innocent people. A good person doesn't care unduly about what evil people do to one another; doesn't give them the same attention they give to the innocent, and so on.

Guilty beings could simply be reformed, or even changed on God's whim. Lessons could be imparted without any suffering or punishment. If God requires that the guilty must be punished, then God simply wants to watch guilty beings suffer for its own sake. — Philosophim

Indeed. If you want an evil person to be happy, are you good or bad? Bad, right? A good person does not indiscriminately want others to be happy - not if you consult your reason. Think of Dr Mengele, the Nazi doctor who tortured thousands with his horrific experiments. He lived out the rest of his days as a wealthy and happy farmer in Argentina or some such place. Now, does a good person think of that as a silver lining to an otherwise awful story? No, it makes a bad story worse. Good people do not want anyone and everyone to be happy.

Our own reason tells us about moral desert. It tells us that if you do wrong freely, then you deserve to come to harm. Not because it will reform you - that would be an added bonus if it occurred, but it is not 'why' you deserve to come to harm, for clearly you deserve to come to harm even if harming you would not reform you - but for its own sake. That is precisely what 'deservingness' expresses. It is no more than God communicating to us that He wants some to come to harm for harm's sake. And that does not imply God is bad, for the people in question are gits.

And even if you have that specific piece of revelation, what makes it okay for god to mete out the punishments and not humans (or a chimp for that matter)? Guilt is guilt, and your comeuppance could reasonably come from anyone it seems to me - unless god stipulates that it is only he who can punish certain acts in certain ways. And if god doesn't make that stipulation, then, according to his own laws, he might be rendered not so omnibenevolent, and thus not exist. Or be evil. . — ToothyMaw

Where have I said anything to imply otherwise? We are living in ignorance in a dangerous world. We deserve that. And what form to those dangers take? Well, there are the natural ones, due to our ignorance of when earthquakes will occur and ignorance of how to prevent ourselves catching this or that disease. And then there are those that we pose to one another. And there is no injustice in what happens to them. They made someone else run the gauntlet; they deserve to run it themselves another time (for this time it is for some other crime, of course).

What we deserve, it seems to me, is to run the gauntlet. God made us run the gauntlet, and from there on in it's down to luck precisely what happens to us.

It's what parents do, though with an important difference. Parents have a god-like power to subject others to life here. And parents know enough about the world to know that it is a place that is full of dangers to the ignorant, and know that we are born ignorant and remain largely so for the rest of our lives here. Yet they voluntarily decide to subject someone to it. And thereby they come to deserve, well - what? They deserve to be running the gauntlet themselves. They are being done to as they have done to others.

So if you want an example of how someone can come to deserve to run the gauntlet, look to human parents. They make what they take to be innocent others run the gauntlet.

And if you want confirmation that we are living in a prison, just look around you at others, or look inside yourself. Notice that pretty much everyone you meet has some vice or other. And notice that you do too.

Furthermore, I don't see why guilt would necessarily require punishment in the mind of an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent being. You must have received a specific piece of revelation supplied by god to come to the conclusion that guilt => punishment. And if you have that my other post applies - people who are innocent according to god might be being punished or punished more than those who are more guilty. — ToothyMaw

If one freely does wrong, one thereby comes to deserve harm. That does not, of course, entail that others are obliged to give one the harm in question. It does, however, mean that it is not unjust for you to receive it. And though an omnipotent and morally good person may not give a wrongdoer all that they deserve, I think it is reasonable enough to suppose that they would not go out of their way to prevent a wrongdoer receiving, by other means, their just deserts.

And that is what this world does.

If a criminal I know to be guilty of horrendous deeds comes to my house seeking sanctuary, I am not a bad person if I turn him away and let the authorities catch him, am I?

God is not a bad person for letting those who have freely attempted to do horrendous things to innocent people languish in one another's company for a while. And God is not a bad person for denying those people the knowledge that would otherwise make this world a safe place for them, is he? To think he is, is a bit like thinking I am a bad person for denying the criminal sanctuary.